Concrete Universality

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 359-360:

Žižek takes up this Hegelian notion, developed at length in his Greater Logic, to speak to that final moment of the dialectic, in which something (Being) coincides with its opposite (Nothing). 'Concrete universality' is thus achieved not when there is one universal for which all others stand in, but--hence the connection with the 'feminine' logic of the not-all--when this universal is only the space that allows the equivalence of all the others, when this universal itself is only one of these others: 'What we have here is thus not a simple reduction of the universal to the particular, but a kind of surplus of the universal. No single universal encompasses the entire particular content, since each particular has its own universal, each contains a specific perspective on the entire field' (p. 69). In this sense, there is no neutral, objective construction of social reality, because any supposed master-signifier or quilting point is itself only one of the elements to be sutured. This relates to Žižek's more general argument, following Adorno and Levi-Strauss, that the definition of society is to be found neither in any of its various descriptions nor in their combination, but in the very split they indicate: 'There is no neutral position, but precisely because there is only one science, and this science is split from within' (p. 77). It is in this sense that Žižek can say that each genus has only two species, the genus itself and that void for which it stands in (p. 326). This is to be seen in the question of sexual difference: there are not two sexes that can be put together, but only one sex (masculine) and that for which it stands in (the feminine), and it is for this reason that sexual difference is one of the ways of properly rendering the 'concrete universality' of the social.